


While Steady Stays the Sea

by burn_me_down



Category: SEAL Team (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hurt Clay Spenser, Hurt Sonny Quinn, Hurt/Comfort, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:48:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24383059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burn_me_down/pseuds/burn_me_down
Summary: A collection of unrelated one-shots loosely inspired by lines from songs. Chapter three: “Something will go wrong. Something always goes wrong, because this is Mandy’s life. She doesn’t get happily ever afters. She made peace with that a long time ago.”
Relationships: Jason Hayes & Clay Spenser, Mandy Ellis & Jason Hayes, Mandy Ellis/Original Male Character, Sonny Quinn & Clay Spenser, Sonny Quinn & Ray Perry
Comments: 40
Kudos: 143





	1. Lifting my head up from the dirt

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve been busy lately, and even when I do have free time, everything I’ve tried to write has fallen flat. I considered just giving up on fic-writing altogether, but decided instead to try doing a series of short one-shots in hopes of shaking some words loose. Each of these is inspired by a lyric from a random song. First up is _Lifting my head up from the dirt,_ from the song _Hold Me Up_ by Sam Tinnesz.

He wakes up in the evening, with a piercing headache and a mouthful of dirt.

It’s the dirt that bothers him most: the grit between his teeth, the taste of metal. He manages to lift his face just enough to let it dribble thickly from his mouth, small globs of congealed soil splatting on the dusty ground below. Instinct tells him he needs to move, that whoever did this to him could still be around, so he tries to roll over and get his hands under him.

He realizes an instant too late that that was a very bad idea.

Something in his left shoulder _shifts_ with a sickening grate. He gags, dirt and bloody spit trailing from his lower lip as he fights back nausea. After a few endless seconds, the pain subsides enough that he’s able to tuck his left arm against his abdomen, roll a bit to the right, and push himself shakily up to a sitting position. His head swims, and the throb in his temples intensifies; he breathes through it, closing his eyes against the searing brightness of the setting sun.

Blinking away tears, he cautiously eases open his eyelids to see a few unremarkable buildings, a small stretch of concrete, and beyond it untamed forest, trees casting long shadows against the slanted light.

That expanse of green calls to him. It promises refuge, a hundred hollows to hide in. With his good hand flat on the sun-warmed earth, he pushes up to his knees, stumbles to his feet, and staggers across cracked concrete and into the growing gloom of the woods. His head pounds. His left leg doesn’t hurt exactly, but it feels strangely heavy and uncooperative. He trips over ridges and roots half a dozen times before finally deciding he’s made it deep enough into cover to sit down and take stock of his situation.

Time and date: Unknown. Location: Unknown. Mission objectives: Unknown. Status: Injured but ambulatory. Enemy: Also unknown. Short-term memory: Fucked, apparently. Resources: Not a whole damn lot.

He’s wearing jeans, scuffed work boots and a plain T-shirt. No weapon, no gear of any kind; not even so much as a phone in his pocket.

What about his team? If he’s out in the field, in danger, he should have a team with him. He knows that much. Unfortunately it seems that if he _did_ have a team with him, their current location can best be summed up as ‘not here,’ so he’s on his own. Can’t assume rescue will be coming.

In hindsight, sitting down might not have been the best idea, because now that he’s on the ground, standing back up seems like an insurmountable task. The woodland quiet, a gentle summer hum of bugs and birdsong, feels the furthest thing from threatening. Between that and the skull-splitting headache, the balky leg and the lurking agony of his unstable shoulder, he struggles to find motivation to move.

It’s an out-of-place noise that finally does it. Back from the direction he came, on the other side of the trees, floats the faintest shiver of sound: a voice. A fragment of a word he feels like he should be able to recognize, but doesn’t. Something about it gnaws at his brain, but he puts the mystery aside for now, telling himself _Survival first, Sherlock._

Gritting his teeth against a groan, he gets up and goes onward.

Though it’s late in the day, the heavy air hangs warm and muggy. Sweat lingers on his skin, dampening the dried blood crusted in his hair and carrying it down his face in small rusty rivulets that stain his fingers when he wipes them away.

Behind him, the voices rise again, too stifled by the thick foliage to make out more than the cadence of them. An instant later they’re joined by the faint, agitated barking of a dog.

His heart sinks down through the soft carpet of moss beneath his feet.

Well shit, they’re tracking him. Somehow he never thought of that possibility.

He’d already been hoping to find a stream or river; all this sweating isn’t doing much to cool him off, but it’s sure as hell making him feel dehydrated. His mouth is now dry as well as gritty, his throat burns, and the tremendous thumping of pressurized pain in his temples just keeps growing harder to think through. Now he needs surface water for another reason as well: to hopefully throw the dog off his scent.

He doesn’t find any water. As he stumbles onward, the dizziness intensifies. After a while he has to pause and dry heave.

He doesn’t even remember stopping and sitting down, but sometime later he blinks awake to find himself propped against a tree trunk, swallowed up in deep shadow, with all but the faintest ghost of light gone from the western sky. He watches as tiny blinking lights float up toward the emerging stars overhead.

Fireflies. Wherever he is, there are fireflies.

He should get up. Get moving. His life may depend on it.

Instead he blinks again, and the next time he opens his eyes there are flashlight beams and frantic voices.

“Jace! Trent! We got him!”

That’s Brock, an uncharacteristic tremor underlying his words. Brock, telling Cerberus to stay. Brock, dropping to his knees and saying tightly, “Clay? Hey, Clay, can you hear me? Look at me, buddy.”

Clay looks, but then there are more flashlights and more people and more talking. The voices hurt his head and the light hurts even worse, so he closes his eyes and tries to go back to sleep, but that makes the voices get all upset. They talk at him until he blinks his eyes back open and snaps, “What?”

That makes everything go quiet for a blessed few seconds. Then Jason repeats the word, but in a much more dangerous tone: _“What?”_

Trent, who at some point must have replaced Brock at Clay’s side, says mildly but firmly, “Hang on, Jay. Let me finish checking him over.”

Jason shuts up, but he doesn’t look happy about it.

Trent performs some mild torture, much of which seems to involve lights and poking. From somewhere back in the gloom, Sonny asks anxiously, “Well? He okay? His brain ain’t busted or nothin’?”

A longsuffering sigh, and then Trent says, “He’s definitely got a concussion, plus shoulder and hip injuries from where he hit the ground, which isn’t surprising. He needs to go to a hospital for scans and real medical treatment, but I think he’s stable for the time being.”

“Oh thank God,” Sonny breathes with a level of sincerity that makes Clay feel oddly warm, despite his continued state of misery. That warmth ebbs a bit when Sonny continues hopefully, “We can be mad at him now, right?”

Jason doesn’t wait for Trent to answer either way. Words short and clipped, he asks, “What the _hell_ were you thinking?”

Clay blinks. Has a hard time getting his eyes back open. Now that he knows he’s safe, all he wants to do is sleep for about a year. Sleep until his skull no longer feels like it’s filled with broken glass. “Uh,” he says. “I... I don’t... know what...”

“If you _ever_ pull a stunt like that again-” Jason begins heatedly, but then cuts off midsentence.

Clay forces his eyelids back up to see that Ray has laid a restraining hand on Jason’s arm. “Not now, Jace,” he says quietly. “He’s so scrambled he won’t even remember it anyway. Give him a little time to heal and get his bearings first.”

Jason looks like there’s a live frog trapped in his mouth trying to get out, but after a minute he nods. Ray Perry, bless his kind heart, gives Clay a slight smile and pats his good shoulder. “We got you, brother,” he tells him. “You’re gonna be just fine.”

Clay considers nodding, thinks better of it, and just closes his eyes again. Trent says something about not wanting to move Clay without spinal precautions, and then he goes to call 911, which... Huh. Apparently they’ve been in the States this entire time. Clay has definitely missed something here, and he feels like it’s probably important. Will be. Later. When he can stay awake long enough to care.

Just as Clay is about to drift off again, Jason leans in close to his ear. Softly, keeping his voice low so Ray won’t overhear, he says, “If you ever so much as even _think_ the word ‘parkour’ again, I’ll kill you myself. Got it?”

Clay winces. Oh, he is in _so_ much trouble.

“Copy that, boss,” he slurs, and then he goes to sleep so he won’t have to deal with it for a while.


	2. What’s on the line

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all the kind, encouraging words on the first installment! Here’s chapter two, inspired by the lyric _What’s on the line_ from the song _Sound off the Sirens_ by Sam Tinnesz. Warning for implied wartime violence and emotional trauma to a child.

Sonny tucks the child into a crevice that’s just big enough for her tiny body. Hands trembling, he rummages through his pockets, pulls out every piece of candy he can find, and dumps it all into her lap.

“You stay right here, okay kiddo?” Sonny’s voice comes out barely audible, more breath than words. The little girl probably doesn’t even understand English anyway. She stares up at him with huge dark eyes, her too-thin face all sharp edges in the deep shadow, and doesn’t make a sound. The tearstains painted in the dust on her cheeks are dry; she must have quit crying long before he scooped her up and ran. Now she just looks hollow, too shellshocked to even show interest in the candy.

Sonny is possibly down to seconds rather than minutes, the last dregs of precious time left before trouble catches up with him, unless he gets moving. He needs to put as much distance as possible between himself and the little girl to make it less likely that she’ll get caught in a crossfire. Much as he’d love to unwrap one of the sweets, try to coax her into tasting it so she’ll have something besides fear to focus on, he doesn’t dare stay any longer. Flipping off the helmet light he’s been shielding with his hand, Sonny rises and stumbles his way through the tumbled rubble until he reaches the dim ribbon of road that ran through the middle of the village before it got bombed to hell.

There’s only faint ambient light; overhead, a sliver of moon lies all but buried behind a bank of leaden clouds. The air tastes damp and metallic. His NODs would be real damn useful right now, but he must have lost them in the blast that rang his bell and left him half buried in debris.

He lost time somewhere in there; thought it was just before sundown, but by the time he stumbled out of the cratered building, the sky was dark. His radio didn’t work and his team was nowhere to be found, which he has tried hard not to think too much about.

The village lay empty and quiet, smelling of lingering blood and explosives. At first he thought he was alone, until he found the kid, scared and scraped up and apparently abandoned.

And then the truckload of armed men pulled up, and Sonny knew he was fucked. All that was left was to try to make sure he didn’t take the little girl down with him. As long as the poor little mite is still breathing, she’s got some kind of a shot at growing up and having a life, and Sonny figures that’s worth going out fighting for.

’Course, best-case scenario would be not going out at all, but he’s hellishly outnumbered and has no backup, far as he can tell. No way to call for a QRF. No idea what the hell happened to his team. All he’s got is a headache, a sidearm, a knife, and a burning desire to bring as many of these sons of bitches with him as he possibly can.

The clouds thicken, swallowing up the last hints of moonlight. Sonny loses the road, stumbles into rubble, falls and cuts his palms. The tangos are on him before he reaches the outer edge of the small ruined village.

The first sign that his luck has run out is a single shot - the sudden bright bloom of a muzzle flash; the ping and whine of a bullet off stone just to his left. Drawing his Glock while in motion, Sonny ducks into a roll that takes him into the shelter of a half-crumbled wall, and then he fires in the direction of the flash and is rewarded by a faint yelp of what is hopefully pain rather than just surprise.

They’re more careful after that, firing on the move, slowly spreading out to flank his position. It’s only a matter of time now, and these sumbitches know that just as well as Sonny does, so they ain’t in too much of a hurry.

Turns out one of them manages to navigate the rubble under the auditory cover of his fellow assholes’ suppressive fire, get around behind Sonny, and damn near cap him in the head from five feet away. It’s only a whisper of movement that saves him; he takes an instinctive dive to the side that leaves the bullet ripping through empty space instead of his brain. Then he double-taps the tango in the chest, fumbles for another mag, and realizes he’s Winchester.

Well, fuck. Looks like this is it.

Sonny sits up, breathes through a shimmering wave of vertigo, and plants his back against stone. He thinks about the little girl he left behind, surrounded by candy and bombed-out buildings. Far as he can tell, she’s stayed quiet and they haven’t found her yet. The more of them he can eliminate before he goes down, the better her chances will be.

_Sorry, kiddo,_ he thinks with a knife-sharp twist of regret. _You’re fixin’ to be on your own._

He takes deep breaths, blows them out, ignores the way air stutters through his too-tight throat. The way his voice trembles when he breathes, “All right now, Son. Time to shine.”

The night has gone silent, and unnaturally still. Won’t be long.

Sonny blinks against the darkness. He sees Davis’s face, her nose crinkled the way it does when he’s said something dumb as hell and she can’t help but laugh at it anyway.

He sees his brothers, and he wonders where they are, and if they’ll be proud when they come to carry him home.

He takes one more deep breath, grips his Mark 3 knife, and-

The night lights up with gunfire. _Not aimed at him._

Sonny flattens himself, heart and head pounding, and waits it out. In the sudden smoky stillness that follows that brief, bright skirmish, he clears his throat and croaks, “Eagle, eagle.”

“Do not fire west,” Clay’s voice calls in return, followed by the gravel-crunch of footsteps approaching from that direction.

Sonny laughs, more than a tinge of hysteria in it. Not like he has any goddamn bullets left anyway.

Next thing he knows, Clay is dropping to a crouch at his side, flicking on a penlight and shielding it with his hand. Sonny expects teasing, but Clay’s voice is tight when he asks evenly, “You good? Where are you hurt?”

“Fine. Just got bonked on the noggin a little,” Sonny mumbles, immediately wincing at that choice of words, expecting Clay to repeat incredulously, _Bonked? Noggin?_

Again Spenser surprises him, maintaining the tense, businesslike calm. “Did you lose consciousness? How bad is the headache?”

“Maybe,” Sonny hedges. “And not too bad, and since when did you turn into Trent?”

Clay’s no-nonsense demeanor finally cracks a little at that; Sonny catches the brief glint of white teeth in the dim light. “Trent started training me to back him up pretty much the minute I joined Bravo. You’re just now noticing? Maybe you have amnesia.”

“I ain’t got amnesia,” Sonny growls, batting Clay’s hand away from his face.

That’s right about when the actual Trent shows up, which is good, because he’s a hell of a lot better at being Trent than Clay is.

Sonny gets evaluated, fussed over, sniffed and licked by Cerberus, and then finally allowed to stand up with support. There’s a few seconds of vertigo, a swirl in his vision and a low hum in his ears, but it passes, and his brothers’ hands on his elbows hold him steady.

Suddenly, with all the force of a homewrecker, he remembers the little girl he left stashed in the wreckage of her village, terrified and alone.

Holy shit, how could he have _forgotten?_

He hasn’t wasted all that much time since the firefight ended. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen at most. He hopes to God those minutes won’t matter.

“The kid,” he tells Ray, stumbling over his words, then stumbling over his feet as he tries to get moving. “I found a little girl, alive. Left her over... back... thataway.”

“We’ll get her,” Ray assures immediately, in that calm, even tone he uses on panicking people and tantruming children. “We’ll find her, brother.”

“Damn straight we will,” Sonny says, and ignores Trent’s attempts to talk him into sitting back down. He might be a little scrambled right now, but he can damn well find his way back to where he left the little mite.

Sonny’s heart pounds. He trips, and Ray catches him. Trips again, and Clay does.

When they reach the nook where Sonny stashed the child, he stops breathing until Clay shines his light into the dark space, driving away the concealing shadows.

The little girl blinks up at them, squinting against the brightness. She’s sitting in a small sea of wrappers, and smeared chocolate covers the entire lower half of her face.

Huh. Well, apparently she figured out what the candy was for.

The breath Sonny had been holding hisses out of him in a rush, and he slumps, wobbling to the side. Clay half-turns and catches him with an arm around the chest. “Whoa, hey,” he says. “You good?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Sonny flaps an unsteady hand. “Hey,” he says to the girl, softening his voice. “That stuff is pretty good, huh?”

She blinks, silent. Then she raises a grimy hand and holds out a single still-wrapped sweet, offering it to him.

Sonny’s throat goes thick. He swallows twice, then tells her, “You keep that, lil bit. That was for you, okay?”

After a minute, she seems to get the message, pulling back her hand and cradling the candy to her chest like it’s precious. To her, it probably is. Right now it’s the only thing she has in the whole damn world, and there ain’t no universe in which that’s fair.

After Trent checks the girl over and deems her more or less uninjured, Jason scoops her up and they get the hell out of Dodge. When they pass her off to the people who will transport her to the relative safety of some refugee camp somewhere, she’s still clinging to that one last piece of chocolate.

They’re all relieved to make it back onto the plane, to finally be headed home, but for some reason Sonny feels unsettled. Can’t quite bring himself to sleep yet, not when he keeps seeing that little girl’s thousand-yard stare and the way she held that candy out to him even though it was the only thing she had left.

Ray, because he is Ray, picks up on Sonny’s unease and migrates over to sit quietly next to him until he’s ready to talk.

“This shit ain’t never gonna be over, is it?” Sonny barely recognizes the sound of his own voice, slurred and so goddamn tired.

Ray, because he is Ray, knows exactly what ‘shit’ Sonny is talking about, and takes a minute to think it over before answering. “I don’t know,” he admits, and that right there is one of the many reasons Sonny loves him: honesty, even when platitudes would be easier. After a minute, Ray continues with quiet conviction in his tone, “But I sure as hell hope and pray it will. And even if we don’t live to see it...” he shrugs. “Maybe she will.”

Sonny can’t let himself believe that, not truly, but it’s a nice thought. Nice to imagine the girl as a graying grandma, living in peace and playing with a gaggle of grandchildren who are a little bit spoiled and naive in that good way that comes from not having grown up in hell.

He focuses on that image, making it as real as he can, letting the tension ease from his neck and shoulders. His legs are dead, and his left ear won’t stop ringing, and his head feels like an overinflated balloon. He tells himself that he’ll muster the energy to get up and walk the short distance to his hammock so he can get some sleep. Soon. Any minute now.

He wakes up stiff and sore eight hours later, slumped against the netting with his head on Ray’s shoulder, Ray’s arm tucked around him.

And if he doesn’t move out of that warmth right away, well, nobody else needs to know.


	3. Kiss me with the lips of doubt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! I’m not dead! Sorry. Real life has been insane lately, and I’ve kind of lost all my writing confidence? Anyway, here’s another short one-shot as I try to ease my way back in. It’s Mandy-centric and could ultimately be read as either Jason/Mandy romance or friendship. Based on the line _Kiss me with the lips of doubt_ from the song _Fake_ by The Tech Thieves.

The man’s name is David, and he’s a biomedical engineer. Mandy gets introduced to him by Naima, who initially met him because he is her older coworker’s cousin’s step-grandnephew or something equally convoluted. Basically, Naima knows _everyone,_ and Mandy made the mistake of mentioning the barren wasteland her dating life has been lately, so: introduction to David, who unfortunately is very attractive. It would be easier to ignore him if he weren’t, but he’s fit and athletic and has dark hair going silver at the temples, and his rolled-up sleeves show just the right amount of tastefully tattooed forearm.

Personality-wise, David is soft-spoken but deeply passionate about his work in biocompatible prostheses, and he clearly respects and likes that Mandy is passionate about her job as well. He listens to everything she says with genuine interest; she never once gets the feeling that he’s just waiting for his turn to talk.

Their first date consists of a nice dinner followed by a short hike up to a patch of blooming dogwood in the moonlight, and afterward Mandy goes home and thunks her head against the wall a half-dozen times while whispering, “Shit shit shit.”

She likes him. She _really_ likes him.

(Naima, of course, gloats. A lot.)

Over the next few weeks, Mandy keeps waiting for the cracks to show, for David to do something to prove why she shouldn’t date him, why it will never work, and he just... never does. He doesn’t own a weirdly massive scarf collection or try to convince her to watch all of the Fast and Furiouses. He’s kind and funny and respects her boundaries. Every time the conversation slams into a locked door, which is pretty often because Mandy hates talking about the specifics of her past almost as much as she isn’t allowed to talk about the specifics of her job, David gracefully pivots in a safer direction without so much as a blink.

He pays attention to details, remembers things she likes and tailors their dates to fit, and he also turns out to be really damn good in bed. Because of course.

As weeks stretch into months and their ‘thing’ continues to go about as perfectly as anything in Mandy’s life ever does, she grows gradually and irrationally more and more uneasy.

David has his own life and respects that Mandy has hers. He doesn’t push for more than she can give. When they’re together, she has fun and feels heard and valued, and yet... somehow, before and after their dates, there is always a humming in the back of her mind. Unease like a swarm of ants under her skin; like the held breath of always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Which it will. Something will go wrong. Something _always_ goes wrong, because this is Mandy’s life. She doesn’t get happily ever afters. She made peace with that a long time ago.

It doesn’t escape her notice that that belief could end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy, so she tries hard to push away the worry, to be present and enjoy her moments with David for what they are, without letting an uncertain future intrude on the now.

When the other shoe finally does drop, it comes in the form of the last thing Mandy ever would have expected: a tiny, scruffy kitten.

She and David have been to see a movie, and they’re on their way out, halfway through a spirited debate about the plausibility of its plot, when David spots a sad little lump of filthy off-white fur huddled against the theater’s outer wall.

It’s not like Mandy wasn’t already aware of David’s compassion. After all, it’s the main reason why he is so passionate about improving the prosthetics he makes. Some scientists and engineers seem most motivated by the challenge, the problem, the puzzle to solve; she has long since realized that that’s not true of David. Oh, he enjoys those aspects too, but he is primarily driven by a genuine desire to help people. He wants to make lives better. He wants to see, tangibly, that his work has led to less pain, better mobility, higher confidence. He can turn incandescent with joy over something as simple as a former avid runner’s first successful morning run since the accident, or a child picking up a cup of milk without spilling.

Somehow it never occurred to Mandy that that innate compassion might extend beyond just humans.

She is no judge of cats - or animals at all, really; Bravo’s dog is one of the few she’s ever even taken the time to notice - but she guesses the kitten is barely big enough to be away from its mother. It looks miserable, its tiny flanks rising and falling with rapid breaths, its face downturned.

If it were up to Mandy, she would walk right on past with hardly a flicker of a glance. It isn’t that she’s cruel, she tells herself, or even uncaring; it’s simply that she has to prioritize. She sees, and sometimes even unintentionally causes, enough _human_ suffering to wear her soul down to the quick - so much that she can’t feel it all and survive. Animals? Their plight barely registers. She can’t let it. There’s just no room. No capacity. It sounds harsh, but it’s reality, and she is very, very good at finding a way to live in reality. She has had to be. Always, even as a child.

But David? He notices the kitten and stops, and seconds later he’s got a mewing lump wrapped up in his jacket.

They go back to David’s house, which has gorgeous hardwood flooring and always smells faintly of Murphy oil soap. He tries calling half a dozen local veterinarians and shelters; upon receiving no response, he ends up turning to some YouTube channel called The Kitten Lady. Next thing Mandy knows, she’s being sent out on an emergency midnight run to pick up canned cat food from Walmart. Definitely not the way she saw her day ending. When she and David made plans to head back to his place after the movie, she was anticipating a lot more fun and a lot less clothing.

Harboring some faint hope that the night can still be salvaged, she brings the food back to David’s place, where she watches his face light up while he watches the kitten, making a sound somewhere between a purr and a growl, ferociously tear into a helping of disgusting diluted wet food.

David has only just met the ugly little thing, and already he is looking at it with a sort of open affection that drives a tiny spike of ice into Mandy’s heart. She isn’t sure she has ever looked at anything like that. Or any _one,_ even.

She pushes that thought away, trying to focus on David, on the soft light of joy in his eyes as he strokes a careful finger down the purr-growling kitten’s tiny spine. It’s clear the little cat already means a lot to him. In fact, it could be good leverage; a perfect pressure point to target if she ever needed to-

She blinks, the thought dissolving into hollow white noise. Her stomach flips with nausea.

“Mandy?” David’s voice sounds soft, a bit tentative. She blinks and finds him closer than she’d realized; he has tucked the now-sleepy, docile kitten into the front pocket of the oversized hoodie he put on for that specific purpose. His eyes search her face, calm and careful and much too damn perceptive, and suddenly the walls crush at her shoulders. She can’t breathe. Can’t stay here one minute longer.

Mandy opens her mouth, searching for words, and finds... nothing. The inside of her head echoes like an empty well.

Her phone buzzes.

She isn’t sure she has ever before in her life been so grateful to get called in to the base past midnight.

With effort, she arranges her face into a rueful, apologetic smile. “I’m sorry. It’s work. I’ve got to go in.”

David exhales and nods, his face softening into an answering smile. He brushes a strand of hair away from her cheek, brushes a kiss across her lips, and watches her leave with a slight crease between his eyebrows.

She spends the entire drive to the base breathing slowly and evenly, in and out, while trying to figure out how the hell she’s going to break up with David.

_It’s not you, it’s me_ is such a goddamn cliche, and he’s too good a man for her to want to do that to him, except... it’s true.

Well, maybe not exactly. It’s neither him nor her, really; it’s just... _them._ It’s the combination of the two of them. They don’t work. Deep down, she knew all along they wouldn’t, and only just now, with the damn kitten, put her finger on why.

He’s a man who brings home strays, who views the world with fundamental optimism, and Mandy... Mandy is a woman who looks at other people and sees everything they love as _leverage._ Who can’t _not._

At the briefing, she gets to spend about 90 seconds believing she’s doing a passable job of hiding her internal turmoil. Then Jason sidles up, hands her a cup of coffee, bumps her shoulder gently with his own, and asks in that quietly straightforward way of his, “You good?”

Mandy curls her fingers around the warm ceramic. She opens her mouth to say she’s fine.

What comes out instead is, “I think maybe I’m not a very good person.”

She blinks. Her throat makes a faint wheezing sound in a belated attempt to suck the words back in.

The press of Jason’s arm against hers increases ever so slightly. She feels him inhale, exhale, take a slow sip of his own coffee. Then he says mildly, “You know, by some people’s standards, probably none of us here are.”

He looks at her then, his gaze fierce and intense and everything David’s wasn’t.

“But what we are,” he says with quiet conviction, “is _necessary._ And we’re using it the right ways, for the right reasons. To keep people safe. And to let them go on thinking of themselves as good people.”

She breathes out, some of the tension leaving her. Nods. Jason nods back. They stay like that, side by side leaning against a table and sipping coffee, until the briefing starts.

_Necessary._ She can live with that.

Especially since she doesn’t have to do it alone.


End file.
